"Ubuntu, once the darling of desktop Linux and the overwhelmingly popular choice for newcomers, may soon lose that role to Mint." I switched to Mint KDE, and have no intention of going back. By the way, KDE4 is finally good (don't hit me, Aaron) - fast, fluid, stable, pretty, and thanks to its versatility, a joy to use after a few hours of tweaking. Just... Please, unify Plasma and the regular widget style. This is insanity.

Wikipedia traffic shows that Ubuntu has more than an order of magnitude more users than mint.
The vocal minority that continues to decry the loss of the gnome2 desktop really need to get over the fact that there are a lot of people out there who *really like unity*.

If I switch back to KDE, it will be because konsole is better than gnome terminal, dolphin is better than Nautilus, and kwin is better than compiz.
I'll make it a unity clone with krunner serving as the dash and hud, though, and I will use kubuntu.

Hopefully the usage of Qt5 and QML for mobile Ubuntu means that they might port desktop Ubuntu to that, though.
The bad things in the Ubuntu desktop are all Gnome.